Recently it has been taking longer and longer to match for a live game, especially for the ~40min time settings.
I usually play around the same time but I need to plan ahead a bit to organise my time. So it’s all the more frustrating when I spend 20 mins of that time just waiting. So it got me thinking that perhaps other people would also like to set aside time slots to play.
The overall idea is to match for games that will actually happen in the future in a specific time slot.
The way I would use this is to schedule an auto-match for each time this week that I’m able to play. If I get there and I haven’t been matched, I can still try to wait and a game as normal, but hopefully I’d mostly jump straight in.
For custom games it would be the same as usual except the game will have a start time, which could be a date in the future. Both players get an email reminder an hour beforehand.
For auto-match, I can specify a set of times that I’m happy to play at, and if I’m prepared to play more than one game in that range. There is a calendar that shows slots where people want to play and I can choose to challenge that player (without seeing their identity).
The time-ranges can be recurring, but I have to confirm after each game that I still want to keep the range open.
Another version of this is an automatch pool, which happens at certain pre-determined scheduled times. It’s a bit like a recurring tournament, but it’s just one auto-matched game. I can see how many people are already in the pool, the rank distribution and the scheduled start time. When the matching starts, people get matched in a best-effort way according to ranking, and then by the order they joined. All games start at once, to allow for re-matching if there are no-shows. If one person is left over at the end, they get put in the usual auto-match and are sent a sad face emoji.
Seems like a good idea. Just throwing ideas out there:
Both ideas seem indeed variants of championships (mechanically), just limited to a single opponent and a single game / round.
Perhaps starting with a “single scheduled 1v1 game” is the quickest way to get some traction.
The current blocker for using the tournament system for this right now, is that tournaments have a minimum of 3 rounds, instead of the desired 1. The UI allows for 2 player tournaments so that’s okay.
A challenge is in making it clear in the UI what this, so that others are aware that it’s not really a tournament in the typical meaning. Perhaps tournaments created with these settings get sorted in tournament under a different header: scheduled 1v1 games.
The bigger idea of “a player pool auto matches at time X:XX” seems a bit more complex, though that could technically be “a multiplayer tournament with just one round and no declared overall winner”. Those tournaments could be spawned hourly by OGS, like the default tournaments. If it’s full, it can simply expand the number of slots or spawn a second tournament for more slots until the start time.
The proposal for players “spawning” multiple 1v1 challenges in bulk, I’m not sure if it’s a good idea to let players do that. It seems it could easily abused by spam.
So in summary:
Short term suggestion: expand tournaments to allow 1 round
Long term suggestion: implement hourly scheduled 1-rounds tournaments, with no overall winner at the end
Using the existing tournament system (with tweaks) may make sense for the back-end implementation, but that’s not how I imagine this being presented to users.
I don’t believe that users will discover and use the feature if it’s hidden away as a tournament option. The user interface needs to be very specifically designed to focus on the problem that it’s solving, and to be discoverable for users who may benefit from it.
It’s worth mentioning though that the game-finding screens are currently already quite complicated and confusing, especially for new users. It will be difficult to add an extra mechanism without making it even more complicated.
I fear there isn’t really such a thing as a feature like this that doesn’t have a complicated and confusing UI. It’s a good idea; it’s also inherently a power-user feature, and has a lot of tricky design considerations that live matchmaking doesn’t.
As you note, the automatch queue vs the custom game queue (with all the permutations of each) is already confusing to new users, and adding a third scheduled queue (or more appropriately set of N-dimensional queues given several parameters) is certainly not going to simplify things. There are surely things that could be done do to make the current match screens a bit less confusing, but generally the way this is solved on other Go servers (or implicitly on chess servers) is by having fewer matchmaking options, not adding more (i.e. fewer automatch parameters, and/or excluding public custom challenges entirely).
Honestly, the simplest no-code version of this is probably forum (or chat group) coordination. You could create a forum thread for an “online OGS freeplay club” where you all show up at the same time on the same day every week. It’s certainly not as robust or discoverable as what’s being proposed, but it also requires zero code and zero design considerations. Success there would also produce strong evidence for “this is a play pattern people want”.
I would particularly love to see this “Scheduled Game” feature for blitz rengo. Currently, I have to wait for hours and hours to get enough people to start a blitz rengo.
Doesn’t this have 5 games?
I don’t understand what I’m looking at. It shows 5 matches with links. 2 of the 5 links are to tournaments, and the other 3 are to games. Although clicking them opens nothing.
If I understand correctly, the top part is just an HTML description provided by the tournament director. In the bottom you can see the one match. It’s a single elimination tournament with 2 two players so I’m not sure how else it could work out.
Hi, I find it difficult to find a 20min match, and I’m around 13k, i like to play slow games so i can have time to think. With the fast paced game you don’t learn much at my lvl. I was wondering if you would be interested to play a game from time to time. I can manage my time if it align with yours, I’m based in Canada.